Trend Analysis and Spatio-Temporal Zoning of Urmia Lake Basin Precipitation and Selection of Indicator Stations by Multivariate Statistical Methods

Lake Urmia, as one of the most important lakes in the country, has an inappropriate environmental condition due to excessive consumption of water and climate change. The study of climate change and rainfall distribution in this area can improve water management in this basin. In this study, the information of 65 weather stations in the period of 1997-2016 were used for precipitation zoning of Urmia lake basin. For this purpose, the data of each month were standardized and arranged in a matrix with dimensions of (n*m) in which n is the number of stations (65) and m is the number of months (12). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed on data matrix and the main components were determined according to their Eigen values greater than one. Then the principal component score (PCS) values were calculated for the selected components. These values were used as inputs in the Ward cluster analysis method. Then, the Procrustes method was used to determine the index stations. The results showed that the first two main components incorporated more than 87% of the all data variances. Based on the selected components, six distinct precipitation regions were identified throughout the basin. Moreover, it was found that four stations located in different points of the Urmia lake basin namely Mehmandar, Sarab, Babaroud and Santeh can be considered as indicator stations. These stations incorporated more than 84% of the all data variances of basin stations. The Mann-Kendall trend test showed that the rainfall in the autumn season has a significant increase trend, while annual precipitation has only a significant increase trend in one of the clusters.